Palestinian Zombie: Settler-Colonial Erasure and Paradigms of the Living Dead

Abstract

The modern zombie myth is as fascinating as it is often anxiety-inducing to the viewer of horror movies. On the other hand, the zombie is a potent history of racialized physical pain, psychological trauma, alienation, exploitation, dispossession, and displacement in capitalist modernity. In this essay the different figurations of the zombie are followed in a cultural analysis and critique from the plantations of Haiti, to Auschwitz and eventually to the Middle East. Next to that, this essay brings to light the long history of Palestinian dispossession and erasure through the figuration of the zombie when seen through an optics of settler colonialism.